HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2024-25

Susie Beckham, History of Art

My doctoral work considered the meaning carried by the art-historical term “Pre-Raphaelite” from its inception in 1848 to the present day. This research was foregrounded by a focus on time. I explored the temporal nuance embedded in the moniker and its relationship to contemporary conventions surrounding linear time and artistic periodisation, investigating the visual translation of this quality into the artists’ work and its legibility to contemporary audiences. My research also drew from textual and visual responses to Pre-Raphaelite artists and artwork to establish when new developments in understanding emerged, what criteria was dominant in these interpretations, and how the moniker has come to possess transmedial applications and international recognition in the present day.

During the HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, I will refine and rework this research for publication as an academic monograph on the meaning of the term "Pre-Raphaelite" through time, with further work to be published in academic journals. I intend to organise an interdisciplinary seminar at the HRC on the intersection of the humanities and pop culture and new media.

Grace Murray, English and Related Literature

My research is in the history of reading, or how and why people read books in the past. In my PhD I set out to understand what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people thought made their books useful, by examining arguably the most useful genre of all: instruction manuals, or 'how-to' books. By paying attention to where and how these books asked to be read, and notes left in their pages by readers in the past, my research has shown that the kinds of reading people deem 'useful' have always been shaped by social and cultural forces.

In my time as a HRC Postdoctoral Fellow, I will be continuing my work on gardening manuals, following a doctoral fellowship completed in 2023 at the British Library and the National Trust on their horticultural collections. Part of this project will include finding out more about the life and writings of seventeenth-century Yorkshire vicar and gardener William Lawson, and how he described his experience of the Teesside landscape. I will also be developing my PhD thesis into a monograph.

Gaia Blandina, School of Arts and Creative Technologies (Music)

Gaia Blandina is a cellist and interdisciplinary sound artist. She recently earned a practice-based PhD in sound art from the Music department of the University of York. Her artistic practice and research include elements from music, sound art, and visual art practices, as well as strategies and methodologies from composing, collaborating, devising, improvising, collaging, archiving and curating. Gaia’s practice has significant theoretical and philosophical components; these are treated as creative material rather than conceptual background. Each of Gaia’s works emerges from a concept that is explored and developed into a unified piece through the combination of various art practices, media, and research areas; this concept is never treated as a fixed entity, but rather as a variable, imminent notion that is flexible, open-ended and contingent upon various spatial, social, political and historical contexts. Her work is approached from different perspectives and methodologies across multiple areas of artistic and academic enquiry. Her main focus is to explore a cyclical, fluid, and non-hierarchical relationship between theory and practice in order to develop innovative, idiosyncratic strategies. Gaia has collaborated and performed with various artists, groups and improvisers including Desmond Clark, Adam de la Cour, Sophie Fetokaki, Catherine Laws, Loré Lixenberg, Neil Luck, Roger Marsh, Rachel Musson, Chihiro Ono, Lynette Quek, Federico Reuben, Nathan Walker, and experimental music groups like ARCO, The Assembled, qb, and squib-box. She performed at notable venues across the UK, including Centrala, Cafe OTO, and at the hcmf for a rendition of Beckett’s Quad.

For the HRC postdoctoral fellowship Gaia will develop, in collaboration with Bryony Aichison (Department of English and Related Literature) a project titled ‘Transdisciplinary Walks: Speculative Histories and Soundscapes of North Yorkshire’. The project aims creatively to reinterpret selected landscapes of North Yorkshire by integrating sound art, poetry, and participatory activities. The project adopts a transdisciplinary approach; it will integrate sonic art practices, philosophy and ecopoetics, utilising walking-as-research as a method to engage academic and non-academic audiences.

Over the course of the next year, five walks in North Yorkshire will take place, each with a specific theme and strategy, exploring how theoretical, creative, physical and imaginative perspectives can be intertwined to shape speculative histories and soundscapes. The themes will be related to North Yorkshire’s biodiversity, waterways, sacred sites, architecture, and literary heritage. The outcomes, including speculative histories and soundscapes, creative maps and sonic collages, will emerge and be developed in workshops and participatory activities during and after the walks. These will form a collection that will be showcased in a curated event and multimedia installation next year.

Claudia Nader Jaime, School of Arts and Creative Technologies (Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media)

My PhD explored the benefits of ASMR-inducing media as a digital mental health intervention for young people. Throughout my PhD journey, I faced numerous challenges in academia as a disabled, neurodivergent, overseas, queer person of colour. This pushed me to learn a handful of non-traditional, yet valuable, strategies that I, and people from diverse backgrounds, have found life changing. The HRC Postdoctoral Fellowship will enable me to combine my own and the community's lived experience as well as our passion for mental health and social justice to help visibilise more accessible, inclusive and sustainable ways to thrive as an early career researcher. For this, a series of co-production workshops will take place in collaboration with neurodivergent, disabled as well as racialised researchers from across the University. In these workshops, we will discuss and learn about everyone's experiences with the purpose of nurturing anti-oppressive practice in academia. The proceedings of these workshops will be integrated into a collective-made open-access handbook to be made available digitally through the LibGuides digital platform of the University as well as in print through the University Library.

Daniel Kim, Philosophy

My PhD thesis offered an original account of perceptual experience by combining naïve realism, a prominent Anglophone theory of perception, with insights from the Phenomenological tradition. Taking this holistic approach, I argued that there are some essential features of experience – such as self-consciousness, temporality, and anticipation – that shape its subjective character. I also showed how this framework helps clarify both actual and hypothetical forms of hallucination.

During the HRC Fellowship, I plan to further develop this novel research programme by exploring its implications for current debates in cognitive science and psychology. Specifically, I intend to show how my approach can provide a fitting conceptual framework for the growing field of embodied cognitive science, which emphasizes the dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and environment in shaping cognition. The Fellowship will allow me to complete several articles on these topics that I have in preparation.